B2B Demand Generation Challenges
Even the best-laid plans in B2B demand generation can get derailed by a few common challenges. Recognising these obstacles to success and taking a preventative approach to safeguard against them can make a world of difference for your business.
The following is an overview of several of the key B2B demand generation challenges that you must overcome to optimise your sales and marketing outcomes.
Attracting Well-Qualified Leads
According to a recent DemandGen report, 41 percent of marketers indicated that identifying new lead sources was their greatest challenge to demand generation. This amount made it the highest-reported hurdle.
Keeping your prospect and sales pipeline full is difficult because you not only have to implement strategies to attract people to your business, you have to drive the right people and keep them coming on a regular basis.
Surprisingly, only 14 percent of DemandGen respondents cited lack of data a primary challenge.
Instead, marketers reported that being overwhelmed by the volume of data held by their company and not knowing how to use it to improve lead generation are problems. Develop your strategies to enhance demand generation by knowing what type of data to collect that is in line with your marketing department needs.
Then, you can deliver the set of well-qualified prospects that your sales reps need to drive conversions efficiently.
Using Your Ideal Customer Profile
The secret behind an ideal customer profile for demand generation is matching those prospects to your most profitable customers. As I’ve said many times before, not all leads are created equal.
So don’t only focus your efforts on prospects that may be best suited to become customers. Because not all customers are great customers either!
If your customer support team is spending a lot of time looking after one or two clients, perhaps that’s an indication that your sales team should have walked away from that sale.
All that time and effort is eating into the profitability of your business. Work with your sales team and ensure you know the most valuable customer types and target similar companies.
Content Execution
We have discussed on many occasions the importance of content within current and future marketing systems. Thirty-eight percent of Demand Gen respondents pointed to content creation as a key B2B demand generation obstacle. This data indicates that creating content that achieves desired marketing and sales results is more complicated than you might think.
You not only have to source the content, but you need to have it created in a way that ensures messages match your communication strategy and deliver relevance to precisely targeted prospects. The two conventional approaches to content execution are to hire and develop an internal content team or to outsource.
Hiring and maintaining your own team is often expensive. Thus, outsourcing content through highly reputable partners has become a standard approach.
Message Segmentation
Getting the right message to the right prospects at the right time is another common demand generation obstacle.
It is difficult enough to craft content that suits a singular audience; the challenge ramps up when you attempt to customise and personalise messages to multiple segments.
To achieve optimised message segmentation, it is critical to rely on intent data that pinpoints the exact behaviours of targeted decision-makers as they work to resolve a solution. Intent data points you to the right communication method to deliver to the right prospects. The more relevant and personalised your message the more likely it is to create the right opportunities.
Wrap Up
To succeed in B2B demand generation, combine effect targeting strategies with timely and relevant messages that appeal to your prospect’s interests.
Doing so helps you overcome common challenges, improve lead generation efficiency, and improve marketing and sales performance.
